| Subnetting - Yaritz Consulting: The Consultation Company |
We work with subnetting and supernetting. Supernetting is a subset of subnetting.
Subnetting
Subnetting is a common practise when locations can be divided geographically, such as by building. We suggest subnetting for remote services that can travel for long distances. If a known limited number of IP address will be used, use the smallest required block. (I.E. you have a direct link between two routers. This will require only four IP addresses. Two IP addresses will be uses for each router and add one more for the network and one for the broadcast, and your subnet will use four IPs.) We also suggest an alternate internet connection using a multilink router protocol. Routers today are able to maintain two or more ISP connections for reliability.
Supernetting
Supernetting is a common practice in today's internet. Most people are finding that they are constantly runing out of IP addresses. Supernetting is where two subnets are combined to form a larger subnet. This is common in a university environment where a person wants one subnet for the faculty, one for staff, one for students, and one for servers. For example, a person might want to take multiple class C subnets and combine them into a Supernet. A class C subnet is 24 bits wide in the IPv4 space. Supernetting would change the subnet to 22 bits wide, allowing more room for computers and servers, while minimizing routers.
Private LANs
Private networking is very common in the internet. A private network is used mostly for workstations and local IP traffic. The IPv4 network ranges are a class a, 10.0.0.0/8, and a class b, 192.168.0.0/16, and a mix of a class a and b, 172.16.0.0/12. The IPv6 site-local ranges are FEC0::/10 (used for dns with auto-assignment) and FC00::/7 (where most operating systems class FD00::/8 as not routable, effectively rendering the last half as not usable). Private LAN networking requires a program called NAT (Network Address Translation) to convert the private IP to a public IP for use on the public internet.
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